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Monday, February 09, 2015

Sometimes Blogger gets the message. Sometimes it doesn't recognise me and I have to type in words to prove my humanity. Who knew that one day we'd all be proving we're not AIs by copy typing nonsense letters that appear on a screen? I always thought a Turing test would be more interesting than that.

Every time it happens on this blog I want to scream.

Blogger is supposed to recognise me so as to not count my page hits, and

It shouldn't be asking anyone to verify they're not a robot, because I've turned word verification off.

Wednesday, February 04, 2015

I've joined a book club. It's only small at the moment: three or four of us meeting in a pub. It's local though and it's nice to meet other people to talk about books.

This month we read How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran and it was a challenging read. Not that the book is hard or literary, or even very long. The trouble is, it's all about sex and as I read I kept thinking "We can't talk about this at book club!"

If you go to amazon, you can read the beginning for free. It starts like this:

I am lying in bed next to my brother Lupin.
He is six years old. He is asleep.
I am fourteen. I am not asleep. I am masturbating.

The whole time I was reading I kept thinking, "how can we talk about this?" And yet it was actually quite easy in the end.

I started by saying how I'd felt about reading it and we all had a good laugh. And then we talked about how honest Caitlin is in her depiction of what it's like to be a young girl, and how refreshing to read about a young girl who is so keen on sex, and about how she invents and reinvents herself, and what we liked and what we didn't.

It brought back lots of memories of my own childhood as I found myself looking for similarities and differences. One thing it brought home to me is that I wouldn't want to write a book like that. Not because of what other people might think but because I don't want to look back on my growing years with that crystal clarity and tell it as it really was, even if I was the only person in the world to ever read it.